Smile! You're on FPV (Emotes)

SkirmCard · 3rd September 2008, 23:15

Did a search on this and found just a few mentions of the idea, I thought I'd bring it up for discussion:

Since this game is going to be FPV, and nametags will only appear on people you have your "crosshairs" on a person (if I remember correctly), I believe that faces are going to be VERY important, Meaning:

1. Faces will need to be very detailed. (covered in other posts)
2. Expressions and reactions should be as unique as possible.

I was thinking of a feature to add during the character creation screen: Creatable faces connected to emotes. Basically, you create the base face that you want, then alter its mouth/eyelids/eyebrows to certain expressions and set them to emotes. (/smile, /angry, /fight, /normal etc.)

So instead of "/smile" just being a quick pre-generated smile that quickly goes back to your default expressionless face, it puts a smile on your character's face that you set during the creation screen and holds it till you cancel it with some other emote. Whether it be a half-smile, grin, or a huge, teeth showing smile, it is the players choice.

If you don't like the idea of attaching the faces to emotes, then you could attach them to actions. I.E. Set the type of face you want when you swing your weapon, cast a spell, or get hurt.

I believe that a feature like this will really help with the immersion. Whenever I play a FPV melee game it always takes me a little out of the experience when I'm fighting somebody with an expressionless face, or I see NPC's standing still staring off into space like they were zombies.

I have absolutely no idea how hard it would be to implement something like this, and it's not a huge feature (you could just consider it fluff), but it's something I think might really help with immersion (and I remember hearing Henrik say that is really important to him).

Lachrymose · 3rd September 2008, 23:28

i think customizing your very own facial animations would be a little too much, since everyone's individual emotes would have to be stored. it would probably be simpler to have a set amount of animations for you to choose from. so you can select your character's /laugh emote from a list of maybe a dozen or so, and you could do the same for other emotes and even basic animations like you said swinging your sword, etc...

yea, i think this would be a cool idea, and i think it may even help distinguish characters a little bit. since there won't be floating names, someone's expressions may help you recognize them if they have features similar to someone else. sounds like it would be a cool feature, but like you said, fluff.. doesn't seem like it would be terribly difficult to implement though.

zekemorgan · 4th September 2008, 00:20

Interesting ideas. Maybe we will see those with patches to the game eventually.

It would certainly make battle a lot more interesting.

All I can picture in my head right now was the gameplay video of Darkfall where the PC got knocked off a cliff, down a waterfall, and his body was rigid and unmoving the entire time he fell...like a statue.

Would have been a lot more interesting and maybe even humorous with an

emote as he fell...

SkirmCard · 4th September 2008, 00:40

Oh yea, thanks zeke. I forgot to add that you should be able to create an "/ohshiat" face as well

Rathius · 4th September 2008, 02:52

I like what you mentioned about the emotes generally going back to an expresionless face. I think it would be best to keep it separate from the emotes and have a /mood that you can use to apply to your character. And perhaps to get a bit more in depth, certain emotes trigger moods.

Something worth a possible note comes from Entropia Universe. It will actually read certain portions of text that you send out and apply emotes based off of that. It can read things like lol, and the various smilies out there. It will then give up audible/visual cues based on that.

Phi · 4th September 2008, 04:13

I'd like to be able to choose different posture's. It's a way of choosing the 'vibe' you want your character to give off.

an option to choose between animation sets and emotes would add a lot no doubt. I think its a late feature in the genre but there is probably a good reason why

Ulti · 4th September 2008, 11:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rathius

Something worth a possible note comes from Entropia Universe. It will actually read certain portions of text that you send out and apply emotes based off of that. It can read things like lol, and the various smilies out there. It will then give up audible/visual cues based on that.

a system like this would be great, since i don't like to search through 100 of emote commands and when i find the right one it dosn't appeal to the situation anymore.

make it possible to create macros with serval keywords that you can choose to bind emotions so they'd happen naturaly during a conversation.

something like /laugh would be riggered by "haha", "lol", "hehe" or any other word you want to use for it.

SkirmCard · 4th September 2008, 18:10

Connecting to the emotes to regular chat is a good idea, and as Rath said has been done before (I remember WoW even having a character actualy laugh if you just type lol). One problem with connecting it with regular chat would be VOIP. When I usually talk to my friends/people around me it's in a VOIP.

I still think the ability to set "moods" and the ability to create slightly customized faces for different actions would be the most natural option. Who knows, maybe someone wants to grimace when they cast a fireball, and others would want a big crazed-looking smile

realnaste · 26th September 2008, 21:06

we need a "spit emot"
-You kill a half-ork
-You carefully aim at his face
-You spit
^^

mshield · 26th September 2008, 21:15

On a sidenote it would be pretty cool if your face changed while fighting.

Not fighting:

Fighting:

Archaaz · 26th September 2008, 23:53

I very much dig this idea, though I also wonder how feasible it would be technologically. If it could be implemented with no negative consequences then I think individual emotes would add a lot to the game.
Alternatively, I like Lachrymose’s suggestion of a variety for each emote. In this manner you could build a somewhat unique personality for your character.

Phi’s suggestion leads to some interesting possibilities. What if you could select a number of traits; shy, arrogant, sinister, foppish, etc and have the emotes reflect these choices. Perhaps various combinations might produce vastly different results. I gave this a bit of thought during my brief foray into WoW. Though it was a bit limited, and at times downright silly, I found the various voice emotes for each race and gender interesting, and considered then the possibility of choosing from various personality archetypes. These would then influence your character’s emotes.

To take it a bit further (and not for MO, just for general discussion) what about personality tests for your character. This would be more a RP feature than anything else I suppose. If any one remembers playing the old Ultima RPGs, a couple of them used a system for determining one’s class involving a list of ethical conundrums based on the virtues and a set of tarot cards. The results of the character’s choices placed him in one of the eight classes which were in turn based on the eight virtues. A similar system could be used to determine a character’s personality traits and subsequent emotes. This might be more useful for a single player, but could be an intriguing feature.

Reclusiarch · 27th September 2008, 00:49

I would personally be content with lots and lots and lots of emotes instead of creating them yourself.

I mean, it can't be -that- hard to implement...

"Every time someone claims that a feature would surely be easy to add to the game, somewhere a kitten is punted through a plate glass window. Please -- think of the kittens."

NiKtheALiEN · 5th October 2008, 16:22

I'd be happy with loads of pre-defined emotes rather then customised ones.

I'd also like to see 'moods', a type of emote that makes your character hold and move differently, and remains indefinatly until reset by the user. EG, 'Angry' mood might make the character beathe deeply with clenched fists and a stern face. 'Scared mood' would make them look around a lot and appear jumpy.

Rather then typing /emotes seperatly, there should be a way to include emotes into blocks of text, as per example 2 below:

Example 1(bad)
chat bar: Halt, your money or your life!
chat bar: /Halt (character raises hand to stop)

Example 2(good)
chat bar: #Halt, your money or your life!
(in this instance, the '#' identifys an emote that is contained in a string of spoken text. The word is both spoken and emote performed. this way a series of emotes can be included in a large block of text and the timing is maintained.)

Example 3
chat bar: #Hail(character raises hand to welcome) friend, I hope your journey was a safe one, please #follow(character beckons) me and I'll lead you to the battle keep.

Shinzon · 5th October 2008, 20:24

I can't believe previous games didn't invest in to this, this type of technology is nothing complicated, it's not more complicated than the current face morphs. As an example look at the HL2 facial animations, it would be relativley easy to create "Emotion Sliders" that morph the face the way you want it depending on the emotion. In game, along with the player morphs the emotion morphs would be sent to the client ( Just the coordinates of each slider ).

Each emotion has exactly the same sliders that morphs or rather move the facial features. So potentialy you could swap pain and joy, happy and sad facial emotes, creating some disturbed psycopath who enjoys pain... Just because you set the facial sliders to make an apperant happy face for the "Face When Hurt".

Relativley easy system to create, and it would certainly add to the gameplay. The only thing that bothers me is why no one created something like this before; the only game that I remember did anything like this was the first Max Payne, where enemies would swap face textures to mean ones when they start shooting.

I am writing this down... I can't believe no one did this yet...

OMGPIE · 8th October 2008, 03:48

Facial expression would be awesome if it was realistic but I don't want like a set of 3 or 4 faces happy, sad, angry and normal but actual faces that reflect the emotion of your character.

mikesanimation · 8th October 2008, 04:49

Shinzon, a lot of the reason why it hasn't really been done before (there has been something similar in Entropia, however) may be due to the fact of graphic capability. Many computers struggle to handle mmo's enough as it is, and to add in a face mesh morphing feature would require more facial polygons per player and this detail could cause some performance decrease. But you really don't have to go as deep as physically morphing a lot of the mesh, which is what I believe you were hinting at.

Instead of a fully face morph (something similar to hl2), the textures could be altered or there could be slight morphs. Also, in third person view games, you can't see player's faces very clearly. So if you are morphing a face, and other players have to zoom in real close to see it, is there a point to having it at all?

But I think that this is very doable in MO. It would definitely add to the immersion in the game, and it could definitely help to entertain in times of boredom. So if it isn't too strenuous on the graphics, I think this should be done.

---When ever I'm thinking of face morphs, all I can picture is this:

lol stupid garry's mod.

Kraven · 8th October 2008, 05:00

i remember the Emotes in SWG, i quite liked the way they had made "mood" emotes as you mentioned, putting on a face expression.
And i have to admit i loved the push emote to, like a normal soft push to pick a fight (quickly found out /push a stormie when still low level was a BAD idea)

Resin · 11th October 2008, 22:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shinzon

I can't believe previous games didn't invest in to this, this type of technology is nothing complicated, it's not more complicated than the current face morphs. As an example look at the HL2 facial animations, it would be relativley easy to create "Emotion Sliders" that morph the face the way you want it depending on the emotion. In game, along with the player morphs the emotion morphs would be sent to the client ( Just the coordinates of each slider ).

Each emotion has exactly the same sliders that morphs or rather move the facial features. So potentialy you could swap pain and joy, happy and sad facial emotes, creating some disturbed psycopath who enjoys pain... Just because you set the facial sliders to make an apperant happy face for the "Face When Hurt".

Relativley easy system to create, and it would certainly add to the gameplay. The only thing that bothers me is why no one created something like this before; the only game that I remember did anything like this was the first Max Payne, where enemies would swap face textures to mean ones when they start shooting.

I am writing this down... I can't believe no one did this yet...

This is the way it should absolutely be. =D
Sliders linked to actions perhaps with a number of preset 'dispositions' that players could just select or modify with the sliders for max customisation.

Anyone play around with the face tracking avatars in skype? Not that I want this in MO the animations would be way to slow, but someday I could see this as a standard part of ingame voice systems.

What I would like though is head-tracking like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
or this:
http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/

3rd September 2008, 23:15	#1 (permalink)
SkirmCard Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Reno, Nevada Age: 25 Posts: 303 Rep Power: 1	Smile! You're on FPV (Emotes) Did a search on this and found just a few mentions of the idea, I thought I'd bring it up for discussion: Since this game is going to be FPV, and nametags will only appear on people you have your "crosshairs" on a person (if I remember correctly), I believe that faces are going to be VERY important, Meaning: 1. Faces will need to be very detailed. (covered in other posts) 2. Expressions and reactions should be as unique as possible. I was thinking of a feature to add during the character creation screen: Creatable faces connected to emotes. Basically, you create the base face that you want, then alter its mouth/eyelids/eyebrows to certain expressions and set them to emotes. (/smile, /angry, /fight, /normal etc.) So instead of "/smile" just being a quick pre-generated smile that quickly goes back to your default expressionless face, it puts a smile on your character's face that you set during the creation screen and holds it till you cancel it with some other emote. Whether it be a half-smile, grin, or a huge, teeth showing smile, it is the players choice. If you don't like the idea of attaching the faces to emotes, then you could attach them to actions. I.E. Set the type of face you want when you swing your weapon, cast a spell, or get hurt. I believe that a feature like this will really help with the immersion. Whenever I play a FPV melee game it always takes me a little out of the experience when I'm fighting somebody with an expressionless face, or I see NPC's standing still staring off into space like they were zombies. I have absolutely no idea how hard it would be to implement something like this, and it's not a huge feature (you could just consider it fluff), but it's something I think might really help with immersion (and I remember hearing Henrik say that is really important to him). __________________

3rd September 2008, 23:28	#2 (permalink)
Lachrymose Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: SC, United States Guild: Aegis Imperium Playstyle: PK/PvP Age: 22 Posts: 2,275 Rep Power: 6	i think customizing your very own facial animations would be a little too much, since everyone's individual emotes would have to be stored. it would probably be simpler to have a set amount of animations for you to choose from. so you can select your character's /laugh emote from a list of maybe a dozen or so, and you could do the same for other emotes and even basic animations like you said swinging your sword, etc... yea, i think this would be a cool idea, and i think it may even help distinguish characters a little bit. since there won't be floating names, someone's expressions may help you recognize them if they have features similar to someone else. sounds like it would be a cool feature, but like you said, fluff.. doesn't seem like it would be terribly difficult to implement though. __________________ /thread I'm putting every one of you that thinks I'm a girl on my KoS list come release... ________________________________________________ Killer 100.00%, Achiever 46.67%, Explorer 46.67%, Socializer 6.67%

4th September 2008, 00:20	#3 (permalink)
zekemorgan Newbie Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Phoenix, AZ Age: 20 Posts: 49 Rep Power: 1	Interesting ideas. Maybe we will see those with patches to the game eventually. It would certainly make battle a lot more interesting. All I can picture in my head right now was the gameplay video of Darkfall where the PC got knocked off a cliff, down a waterfall, and his body was rigid and unmoving the entire time he fell...like a statue. Would have been a lot more interesting and maybe even humorous with an emote as he fell... __________________ Honor before victory

4th September 2008, 00:40	#4 (permalink)
SkirmCard Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Reno, Nevada Age: 25 Posts: 303 Rep Power: 1	Oh yea, thanks zeke. I forgot to add that you should be able to create an "/ohshiat" face as well __________________

4th September 2008, 02:52	#5 (permalink)
Rathius Member Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: Kansas Age: 24 Posts: 446 Rep Power: 1	I like what you mentioned about the emotes generally going back to an expresionless face. I think it would be best to keep it separate from the emotes and have a /mood that you can use to apply to your character. And perhaps to get a bit more in depth, certain emotes trigger moods. Something worth a possible note comes from Entropia Universe. It will actually read certain portions of text that you send out and apply emotes based off of that. It can read things like lol, and the various smilies out there. It will then give up audible/visual cues based on that. __________________ (Explorer 80, Killer 53, Achiever 33, Socializer 33)

4th September 2008, 04:13	#6 (permalink)
Phi Member Join Date: Aug 2008 Posts: 271 Rep Power: 1	I'd like to be able to choose different posture's. It's a way of choosing the 'vibe' you want your character to give off. an option to choose between animation sets and emotes would add a lot no doubt. I think its a late feature in the genre but there is probably a good reason why

4th September 2008, 18:10	#8 (permalink)
SkirmCard Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Reno, Nevada Age: 25 Posts: 303 Rep Power: 1	Connecting to the emotes to regular chat is a good idea, and as Rath said has been done before (I remember WoW even having a character actualy laugh if you just type lol). One problem with connecting it with regular chat would be VOIP. When I usually talk to my friends/people around me it's in a VOIP. I still think the ability to set "moods" and the ability to create slightly customized faces for different actions would be the most natural option. Who knows, maybe someone wants to grimace when they cast a fireball, and others would want a big crazed-looking smile __________________

26th September 2008, 21:06	#9 (permalink)
realnaste Junior Member Join Date: Aug 2008 Posts: 62 Rep Power: 1	we need a "spit emot" -You kill a half-ork -You carefully aim at his face -You spit ^^ __________________

26th September 2008, 21:15	#10 (permalink)
mshield Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 113 Rep Power: 1	On a sidenote it would be pretty cool if your face changed while fighting. Not fighting: Fighting:

26th September 2008, 23:53	#11 (permalink)
Archaaz Member Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Texas Posts: 395 Rep Power: 1	I very much dig this idea, though I also wonder how feasible it would be technologically. If it could be implemented with no negative consequences then I think individual emotes would add a lot to the game. Alternatively, I like Lachrymose’s suggestion of a variety for each emote. In this manner you could build a somewhat unique personality for your character. Phi’s suggestion leads to some interesting possibilities. What if you could select a number of traits; shy, arrogant, sinister, foppish, etc and have the emotes reflect these choices. Perhaps various combinations might produce vastly different results. I gave this a bit of thought during my brief foray into WoW. Though it was a bit limited, and at times downright silly, I found the various voice emotes for each race and gender interesting, and considered then the possibility of choosing from various personality archetypes. These would then influence your character’s emotes. To take it a bit further (and not for MO, just for general discussion) what about personality tests for your character. This would be more a RP feature than anything else I suppose. If any one remembers playing the old Ultima RPGs, a couple of them used a system for determining one’s class involving a list of ethical conundrums based on the virtues and a set of tarot cards. The results of the character’s choices placed him in one of the eight classes which were in turn based on the eight virtues. A similar system could be used to determine a character’s personality traits and subsequent emotes. This might be more useful for a single player, but could be an intriguing feature. __________________ "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." ~Voltaire (Explorer 80%, Socializer 60%, Killer 40%, Achiever 20%)

27th September 2008, 00:49	#12 (permalink)
Reclusiarch Junior Member Join Date: May 2008 Location: Sweden Age: 28 Posts: 152 Rep Power: 0	I would personally be content with lots and lots and lots of emotes instead of creating them yourself. I mean, it can't be -that- hard to implement... "Every time someone claims that a feature would surely be easy to add to the game, somewhere a kitten is punted through a plate glass window. Please -- think of the kittens."

5th October 2008, 16:22	#13 (permalink)
NiKtheALiEN Junior Member Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: West Midlands, UK. Age: 31 Posts: 95 Rep Power: 1	I'd be happy with loads of pre-defined emotes rather then customised ones. I'd also like to see 'moods', a type of emote that makes your character hold and move differently, and remains indefinatly until reset by the user. EG, 'Angry' mood might make the character beathe deeply with clenched fists and a stern face. 'Scared mood' would make them look around a lot and appear jumpy. Rather then typing /emotes seperatly, there should be a way to include emotes into blocks of text, as per example 2 below: Example 1(bad) chat bar: Halt, your money or your life! chat bar: /Halt (character raises hand to stop) Example 2(good) chat bar: #Halt, your money or your life! (in this instance, the '#' identifys an emote that is contained in a string of spoken text. The word is both spoken and emote performed. this way a series of emotes can be included in a large block of text and the timing is maintained.) Example 3 chat bar: #Hail(character raises hand to welcome) friend, I hope your journey was a safe one, please #follow(character beckons) me and I'll lead you to the battle keep. Last edited by NiKtheALiEN : 5th October 2008 at 16:35.

5th October 2008, 20:24	#14 (permalink)
Shinzon Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Toronto, Ontario Age: 19 Posts: 1,003 Rep Power: 4	I can't believe previous games didn't invest in to this, this type of technology is nothing complicated, it's not more complicated than the current face morphs. As an example look at the HL2 facial animations, it would be relativley easy to create "Emotion Sliders" that morph the face the way you want it depending on the emotion. In game, along with the player morphs the emotion morphs would be sent to the client ( Just the coordinates of each slider ). Each emotion has exactly the same sliders that morphs or rather move the facial features. So potentialy you could swap pain and joy, happy and sad facial emotes, creating some disturbed psycopath who enjoys pain... Just because you set the facial sliders to make an apperant happy face for the "Face When Hurt". Relativley easy system to create, and it would certainly add to the gameplay. The only thing that bothers me is why no one created something like this before; the only game that I remember did anything like this was the first Max Payne, where enemies would swap face textures to mean ones when they start shooting. I am writing this down... I can't believe no one did this yet... __________________ www.aegis-imperium.com Last edited by Shinzon : 5th October 2008 at 20:27.

8th October 2008, 03:48	#15 (permalink)
OMGPIE Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Location: Omnipresent Posts: 1,506 Rep Power: 4	Facial expression would be awesome if it was realistic but I don't want like a set of 3 or 4 faces happy, sad, angry and normal but actual faces that reflect the emotion of your character. __________________

8th October 2008, 04:49	#16 (permalink)
mikesanimation Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: California Posts: 170 Rep Power: 1	Shinzon, a lot of the reason why it hasn't really been done before (there has been something similar in Entropia, however) may be due to the fact of graphic capability. Many computers struggle to handle mmo's enough as it is, and to add in a face mesh morphing feature would require more facial polygons per player and this detail could cause some performance decrease. But you really don't have to go as deep as physically morphing a lot of the mesh, which is what I believe you were hinting at. Instead of a fully face morph (something similar to hl2), the textures could be altered or there could be slight morphs. Also, in third person view games, you can't see player's faces very clearly. So if you are morphing a face, and other players have to zoom in real close to see it, is there a point to having it at all? But I think that this is very doable in MO. It would definitely add to the immersion in the game, and it could definitely help to entertain in times of boredom. So if it isn't too strenuous on the graphics, I think this should be done. ---When ever I'm thinking of face morphs, all I can picture is this: lol stupid garry's mod. __________________

8th October 2008, 05:00	#17 (permalink)
Kraven Junior Member Join Date: May 2008 Location: Denmark Posts: 121 Rep Power: 1	i remember the Emotes in SWG, i quite liked the way they had made "mood" emotes as you mentioned, putting on a face expression. And i have to admit i loved the push emote to, like a normal soft push to pick a fight (quickly found out /push a stormie when still low level was a BAD idea)